New rig - 3D work specific - Already have some hardware

[andrearastelli]

Budget (including currency): < £700 (~916$ US)

Country: UK

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: 3D Modelling (ZBrush, Maya) and Texturing (Substance Painter, Mari) with minimal rendering and some VR - if the budget allows it

Other details: Already have a GTX1060, 2 Full HD Monitors, and want to maintain the internal hard drives in my possession.

 

Hi everyone,

 

I'm trying to upgrade my existing rig with something a little more "modern" and future-proof, in order to, when the budget allows for it, continue the upgrade process.

 

The main work I do is related to 3D Modeling and Texturing, with "some" rendering (with this I mean that rendering is not my main concern, or is not going to be a big deal if a render takes 30 minutes instead of 2).

The modeling work is being done mostly using ZBrush and Maya, while the texturing work is mostly Substance Painter, Foundry Mari and a hint of Photoshop.

The idea is to have a rig that is good enough to be able to do some VR work as well in the future (when the budget allows for it I was planning to upgrade my graphics card into an RTX one.. which one it depends on "when" I'll have budget for that kind of upgrade). 

 

Overall my new rig has to be super quick in response (for this I was thinking that an SSD for the OS and all the main applications is a must).

 

 

The existing rig look something like this:

CPU           | Intel i7-2600k
GRAPHIC CARD  | NVidia GTX 1060
RAM           | DDR3 24Gb

 

 

I started to look both INTEL and AMD, and ended up with the cheapest of the two, that also could guarantee a bit of longevity to the system: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, to be mounted on a ASUS Prime B450-PLUS.

 

 

The overall system is going to look something like this:

MOTHERBOARD   |  Asus Prime B450-PLUS           |  £     84.99
CPU           |  AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8C/16T       |  £    289.29
GRAPHICS CARD |  GTX 1060                       |  £      0.00 - No need / for now
RAM           |  Corsair Vengeance 16Gb DDR4    |  £     58.05
POWER SUPPLY  |  Corsair RM650                  |  £    106.46
SSD           |  Western Digital M.2 500Gb      |  £     52.49
Case          |  Corsair Carbide Mid-Tower      |  £     44.99
CPU Cooler    |  Noctua NH C14S                 |  £     67.56

                                          TOTAL |  £    703.83

 

 

What do you think?

Am I going to hit some serious compatibility problem with the hardware in this list?

 

I am also worried that something could be overkill even with potential future upgrades - for example:

Is the Power supply "too much"? Should I go with a less powerful one?

Is the CPU Cooler overkill for the type of work-loads I'm going to have?

Could there be less expensive and better cases?

 

 

Thanks for all the help on this

[Meganter]

Hello,

 

I would go with something like this instead :

 

 

PCPartPicker Part List

Type	Item	Price
CPU	AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 3.6 GHz 8-Core Processor	£281.94 @ Aria PC
CPU Cooler	Scythe Ninja 5 43.03 CFM CPU Cooler	£50.73 @ Overclockers.co.uk
Motherboard	MSI B450-A PRO MAX ATX AM4 Motherboard	£90.37 @ CCL Computers
Memory	Crucial Ballistix 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3600 CL16 Memory	£78.98 @ Amazon UK
Storage	ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 512 GB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive	£69.99 @ CCL Computers
Case	Phanteks Eclipse P300A Mesh ATX Mid Tower Case	£51.99 @ AWD-IT
Power Supply	SeaSonic FOCUS 550 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply	£82.88 @ Box Limited
	Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
	Total	£706.88
	Generated by PCPartPicker 2020-08-20 10:58 BST+0100

 

[maartendc]

On 8/16/2020 at 4:37 PM, andrearastelli said:

CPU           | Intel i7-2600k
GRAPHIC CARD  | NVidia GTX 1060
RAM           | DDR3 24Gb

 

 

I started to look both INTEL and AMD, and ended up with the cheapest of the two, that also could guarantee a bit of longevity to the system: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, to be mounted on a ASUS Prime B450-PLUS.

 

 

The overall system is going to look something like this:

MOTHERBOARD   |  Asus Prime B450-PLUS           |  £     84.99
CPU           |  AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8C/16T       |  £    289.29
GRAPHICS CARD |  GTX 1060                       |  £      0.00 - No need / for now
RAM           |  Corsair Vengeance 16Gb DDR4    |  £     58.05
POWER SUPPLY  |  Corsair RM650                  |  £    106.46
SSD           |  Western Digital M.2 500Gb      |  £     52.49
Case          |  Corsair Carbide Mid-Tower      |  £     44.99
CPU Cooler    |  Noctua NH C14S                 |  £     67.56

                                          TOTAL |  £    703.83

 

The type of config you benefit from for these professional applications varies greatly depending on the application.

 

A good resource is Puget systems, which does hardware recommendations for a number of professional CAD / design software.

 

Maya appartently only utilizes one CPU core:

https://www.pugetsystems.com/recommended/Recommended-Systems-for-Autodesk-Maya-165/Hardware-Recommendations

 

So you'd be better off with Intel honestly, because they still have the better - per core performance. Although AMD is not far behind anymore. You might want to do some research on all your other applications, and check if they utilize more than one core. If ALL of them are using only one core, you might be better off with Intel.

 

That being said, the rendering engine in Maya is apparently multicore. A core i7 10700 also has 8 C/ 16T just like the 3700X, but will probably have a higher single core speed. It is a little bit more expensive though.

 

I would get 32 GB of RAM, if your projects are very large. That is wat Puget recommends. 16GB is minimum.

 

SSD for sure is needed. Any M.2 SSD will probably do.

 

Why are you going for that cooler? Seems like a cooler designed for low profile cases. Get yourself a tower cooler for better cooling performance.

 

550Watt PSU would also suffice. 650 isnt too crazy overkill though.

 

Good luck!

[brob]

The single core boost clock is 4.8 GHz, all core is 4.6 GHz. Given the workload, this cpu should perform noticeably better than the 3700X.

 

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: Intel Core i7-10700 2.9 GHz 8-Core Processor  (£317.78 @ Newegg UK) 
CPU Cooler: CRYORIG H7 49 CFM CPU Cooler  (£34.99 @ Currys PC World) 
Motherboard: Asus PRIME B460M-A Micro ATX LGA1200 Motherboard  (£96.60 @ SmartTeck.co.uk) 
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3000 CL16 Memory  (£110.00 @ Amazon UK) 
Storage: Western Digital Blue SN550 500 GB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive  (£56.99 @ Amazon UK) 
Case: Thermaltake Versa H17 MicroATX Mini Tower Case  (£32.43 @ Ebuyer) 
Power Supply: SeaSonic FOCUS 550 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply  (£82.88 @ Box Limited) 
Total: £731.67
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2020-08-20 15:29 BST+0100

[andrearastelli]

Thanks everyone for the massive amount of help!!

 

I think I have random questions for every one of you.. most of which are just to understand better the configuration you picked.

 

---

 

Hi @Meganter,

 

are there particular reasons for the hardware you picked?

I'm trying to understand your reasoning behind the components you selected.

 

1. Will I gain something in performance?

2. Are the component you selected better "future-proof"?

3. Are the components better compatible with each other?

 

Thanks

 

---

 

Hi @maartendc,

 

It is true that Maya only currently supports 1 cpu, but every other tool I'm going to use: RenderMan/Arnold for rendering, ZBrush, Substance, Nuke.. all of them are multi CPU (and RenderMan, with the XPU architecture is going to be using CPU/GPU at the same time, hopefully by version 24).

 

Will an Intel CPU still be a better option, in your opinion?

 

Was thinking about 32Gb - but that amount of ram seems to be super pricey, do you have any suggestion for a good quality ram that I could find for a reasonable price? Or maybe can you suggest some characteristics I should be looking at to get the best out of the ones I can find? 

 

About that cooler.. tbh I've no idea that was for low-profile cases. It seemed to be a good option for the price.

I was also looking at tower-coolers but they seems to be HUGE and I thought I need a specific case (maybe wider?) to be able to mount them in.

If this is not the case, I'll start to look at those.

 

Thanks

 

---

 

Hi @brob,

 

the base speed for the i7-10700 is 2.9 Ghz - does this means that I need to change something in the bios to make it perform at the turbo speed you mentioned? Or is it something that auto-triggers when I'm performing CPU intensive tasks?

 

Thanks

 

---

 

It seems that the better option for me would be to go with Intel and spend a little more on the CPU for more performance compared to an AMD one on single cpu tasks.

 

Thinking about it, I guess the work I'll be doing is going to be (on average) splitted this way:

MAYA       |   20%
ZBrush     |   40%
Substance  |   20%
Nuke       |   10%
Rendering  |   10%

Look at this as "user time", meaning: actual work done to make things done by a human.

The effective machine time can be completely different, for example Rendering means the time actually spent in putting the lights, building shaders and previewing the results. NOT the actual render the machine will be doing in order to generate the final images (could that be an animation or a single image) where no user interaction is needed.

 

Not sure if this explanation makes sense for you, or if this is even helpful, but I'm trying to look at the problem from multiple and different angles.

 

For example the link @maartendc about the specificity of how maya uses the hardware is indeed true, but if I'll be using maya for 1h and rendering for 20h, is the single core performance still that of an impact over the core count?

I mean, this is kinda meaningless given that it seems the turbo speed of the i7-10700 is higher than the 3700X on both single and multi core, but still.. I'm curious.

 

 

Anyway, thanks again for the help.

[Meganter]

38 minutes ago, andrearastelli said:

Hi @Meganter, are there particular reasons for the hardware you picked?
I'm trying to understand your reasoning behind the components you selected. For example, will I gain something in performance? Are the component you selected better "future-proof"?

 

Thanks

There is no such thing as future proofing, especially since Ryzen 4000 are rumoured  to be out at the end of this year or so.

 

For the components, better air flow case, better cooler, better ram (probably since it's 3600cl16), better motherboard, similar PSU and very good NVMe SSD.

[brob]

17 hours ago, andrearastelli said:

 

Hi @brob,

 

the base speed for the i7-10700 is 2.9 Ghz - does this means that I need to change something in the bios to make it perform at the turbo speed you mentioned? Or is it something that auto-triggers when I'm performing CPU intensive tasks?

 

The cpu manages core clocks automatically. The lower base clock allows for more aggressive power management to meet the 65W TDP.